Brad,
Here is the first sentence to Hemingway's The Old man and the Sea: "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." It starts in past and shifts to past perfect to discuss a period of time continuing into the day the narrative starts. If you look at the whole paragraph, you can see how he carries that out in following sentences as well. The point all of us are trying to make (patiently, I think) is that context matters. ( Indeed it does - Brad.)
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From my archives:
[log in to unmask] wrote:
I'd love to see what you would do with A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway) or The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald).
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Date: 28 Jun 2006
From: Brad Johnston [log in to unmask]
Subject: A Farewell to Arms?
To: [log in to unmask]
Not even in the service of enlightened self-interest would I subject myself to the inane drivel of Ernest Hemingway.
"The man is a jerk." (Source of quote on request, if I can find it.)
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Here it is:
He took a sip of wine and leaned forward. "And you know," he said, "he (Hemingway) is in fact a remarkable writer. I read one of the stories in that little book, the one published by Monsieur Forsythe. It concerned itself with a young man fishing, alone in the Great American Forest. No dialog, no other characters. Just the young man, and the forest, and the river, and the fishes. Nothing much of import happens. The young man walks through the forest. He arranges a camp for himself. He loses some fish and he catches some others. He eats the fish; very simply prepared, of course. He sleeps, he awakens. But all this is detailed in a language that is so powerful, so apparently simple and precise, and yet so evocative that the story becomes quite profound. Somehow the reader knows, without the writer ever having said so, that the young man has recently returned from the War and its many horrors. I was most impressed."
"Why didn't you read the others?"
"Pardon?"
"You said you read one of the stories in the book. Why didn't you read any of the others?'
"Ah." He sat back and shrugged. "The man is a jerk."
I laughed.
..............
From "Masquerade", by Walter Satterthwait, c.1998.
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